Assessment and Evaluation

Abstract

Research and development in the assessment of language abilities in the past decade have been concerned both with achieving a better understanding of the nature of language abilities and other factors that affect performance on language tests and with developing methods of assessment that are consistent with the way applied linguists view language use. The way language testers conceptualize language abilities has been strongly influenced by the broadened view of language proficiency as communicative competence that has emerged in applied linguistics. And while this view of language proficiency provides a much richer conceptual basis for characterizing the language abilities to be measured, it has presented language testers with a major challenge in defining these abilities and the interactions among them with sufficient precision to permit their measurement. Language testing researchers have also been influenced by developments in second language acquisition, investigating the effects on test performance of other factors such as background knowledge, cognitive style, native language, ethnicity, and sex. Finally, language testing research and practice have been influenced by advances in psychometrics, in that more sophisticated analytic tools are being used both to unravel the tangled web of language abilities and to assure thhat the measures of these abilities are reliable, valid, efficient, and appropriate for the uses for which they are intended.